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1 Department of Public Health, Faculty of Allied Health Sciences, Daffodil International University,Dhanmondi, Dhaka, Bangladesh, 2 Center of Excellence for Health Systems and Universal Health Coverage,BRAC James P Grant School of Public Health, BRAC University, Dhaka, Bangladesh, 3 The GraduateSchool, University of West London, London, United Kingdom

Abstract

BackgroundMillions of children and others across the world are being dangerously exposed to tobacco smoke and toxins in their own homes. Whilst there is limited interest in laws and interventions controlling tobacco use in public places in Bangladesh, no attention has been given topreventing tobacco-use inside homes. This study explores the familial and socio-cultural factors that provide obstacles for ensuring tobacco-free homes in Bangladesh.

Materials and methodsA mixed-method design was adopted and from among the 1,436 tobacco users identified in a population of 11,853, 400 (tobacco users) were selected for cross-sectional survey. This survey involved a probability proportional sampling procedure, and 24 In-Depth Interviews. Multivariate logistic regression was performed to explore the association of familial and socio-cultural factors with tobacco use at home adjusted by other demographic characteristics. Thematic content analysis was done on the qualitative data, and then inferences were drawn out collectively.

ResultsThis study revealed that the prevalence of tobacco-use in the home was 25.7% in urban residential areas in Bangladesh. Multivariate logistic regression analysis identified that familial and socio-cultural factors were significantly associated with tobacco-use at home: marital status (OR 3.23, 95% CI: 1.37–6.61), education (OR 2.14, 95% CI: 1.15–3.99), smoking habits of older family members (OR 1.81 95% CI: 0.91–2.89), tobacco being offered as hospitality and for entertainment (OR 1.85, 95% CI: .94–2.95) and lack of religiosity practice (OR 2.39, 95% CI: 1.27–4.54). Qualitative findings indicated that social customs, lack of religious practice, tobacco-use of older family members, and lack of family guidance were key obstacles for enabling tobacco-free homes in urban areas.

ConclusionUse of tobacco at home is continuing as part of established familial and socio-cultural traditions.If tobacco-use at home is not addressed seriously by the authorities then the emergingthreat of second-hand smoke exposure and harmful consequences of tobacco- use will beexacerbated.

Phones are getting Smart everyday making us Stupid!!!This is the high time to be aware of letting your kids in use of Smartphone.

Story at-a-glance

• Kids spend an inordinate amount of time on their smartphones, communicating with friends (and possibly strangers) via text, Twitter and Facebook, and work to keep up their Snapstreaks on Snapchat • Abrupt changes in teen behavior and psychological health emerged around 2012. Post-millennials spend more time alone, engaged in online socialization rather than face-to-face; they drive less, date less, have less sex and have poorer social and work skills than previous generations • Rates of teen depression and suicide have dramatically risen since 2011, and data suggest spending three hours or more each day on electronic devices raises a teen’s suicide risk by 35 percent • Between 2007 and 2015, the suicide rate for 12- to 14-year-old girls rose threefold; the suicide rate among boys doubled in that same time frame • Data reveal the more time teens spend online, the unhappier they are. Those who spend more time than average on activities that do not involve their smartphone are far more likely to report being “happy” As a lover of technology, it pains me to see what technological advancements are doing to our youth. In a previous article for The Atlantic,1 Jean Twenge takes a deep dive into how smartphones, with 24/7 access to internet and social media, are affecting post-millennials’ mental health.

The article, which is well worth reading in its entirety, is adapted from Twenge’s book “iGen: Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids Are Growing up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy — and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood — and What That Means for the Rest of Us.”

Children today cannot even fathom a life pre-internet — a life where school work involved visits to libraries and phone calls required you to stay in one spot, since the telephone was attached to the wall. Kids spend an inordinate amount of time on their smartphones, communicating with friends (and possibly strangers) via text, Twitter and Facebook, and work to keep up their Snapstreaks on Snapchat.

Even toddlers are proficient in navigating their way around a wireless tablet these days. Twenge discusses the online habits of Athena, a 13-year-old Texan, saying:

“She told me she’d spent most of the summer hanging out alone in her room with her phone. That’s just the way her generation is, she said. ‘We didn’t have a choice to know any life without iPads or iPhones. I think we like our phones more than we like actual people.’”

If it seems like almost everyone has a smartphone these days, you’re not far from the truth. More and more people are carrying around tiny computers more powerful than the lunar module that landed on the moon in their pockets, and they’re doing more with them than ever before.As healthcare goes mobile, it’s important to know as much as possible about your target audience if you want your marketing to be effective. These stats showing how people use their smartphones could have a big impact on how you shape your marketing message for 2016.1. Nearly two thirds of Americans own smartphones (Pew)The crazy part of this stat isn’t that 64 percent of U.S. adults own smartphones—it’s that almost twice as many own smartphones as did just four years ago (35 percent in 2011). The industry is changing and it’s changing fast—who can say where it’ll be in another four years?2. 46 percent of smartphone owners “couldn’t live without” their smartphone (Pew)3. 36 percent of smartphone owners would choose their phone over their TV (Google)With a world of knowledge just a tap away, smartphones are quite literally life changing—and nearly half of smartphone users say that they couldn’t live without all that information at their fingertips. A majority of those people would even choose their smartphones over other sources of entertainment.4. 87 percent of millennials say their smartphone never leaves their side (Zogby)5. 80 percent of millennials say their smartphone is the first thing they reach for when they wake up (Zogby)6. 78 percent of millennials use their smartphones more than two hours every day (Zogby)Millennials and their smartphones are practically joined at the hip. I am the 80 percent; l reach for my smartphone every morning to shut off the alarm and more often than not find myself scrolling through my Twitter timeline. This demographic is only going to get more mobile—if you want to reach millennials, your mobile marketing has to be top notch.7. 51 percent of cell phone users 55 and older own smartphones (Nielsen)It’s not just millennials, though; as of 2014, more than half of cell phone owners over 55 years old use smartphones as well. (There’s even a Jitterbug smartphone.) That means you’re not limiting your marketing to a younger audience when you adopt a mobile-friend mindset.8. 7 percent of Americans are entirely smartphone-dependent (Pew)10 percent of smartphone owners don’t have high speed Internet access at home, while 15 percent have limited options for Internet access. The overlap between those two groups—approximately 22 million Americans—represents another group who go online only with their smartphones. That figure grows to 15 percent among young adults, 13 percent among Latinos, and 12 percent among African Americans. Depending on the demographics of the region your hospital serves, neglecting mobile marketing could mean neglecting a significant percentage of your audience.9. 60 percent of millennials believe everything will be done on mobile devices in five years (Zogby)Millennials make up the largest smartphone-dependent population, and that number will only grow as younger users favor mobile devices over desktop and laptop computers. By adopting a mobile-first mindset now, your hospital can avoid playing catch-up in a few years.10. 64 percent of smartphone owners use their phone to look up health information (Pew)11. 94 percent of smartphone owners look for local information (Google)People are looking online for answers to their health questions, and hospitals are uniquely equipped to provide them. You need to anticipate your community’s needs and share relevant information online where they’ll find it. That means posting to social media and optimizing for search. Optimizing for local search is vital, too—your name, address, and phone number need to be correct and consistent so prospective patients can contact your hospital or find directions to it.12. More smartphone owners use their phone for watching videos than playing music (Pew)13. Vertical video viewing is on the rise (KPCB)Smartphones may be descendants of the iPod, but they do so much more than make phone calls and play music. People love watching videos on mobile—75 percent of users aged 18–29 said they watched a video on the phone compared to 64 percent who listened to music—and there’s now a growing trend of vertical video viewing. Popularized by Snapchat, portrait video ads see completion rates as many as 9 times higher than landscape ads and could be a good fit for a mobile ad campaign regardless of platform.

Every body gets angry at times. But one in five Americans has an anger management problem. A person’s anger may make them melt down in front of others and yell, scream, hit out or abuse others. This type of outburst is destructive anger at its most potent. It hurts you and it hurts others, in physical, emotional and social ways. If you have trouble restraining yourself from angry outbursts, you need to retrain yourself on how to handle challenging situations. This is the best way forward to a calmer life. Following the yo will get a concrete guideline how to control anger in right moment https://www.wikihow.com/Restrain-Yourself-from-an-Outburst

Health education is one strategy for implementing health promotion and disease prevention programs. Health education provides learning experiences on health topics. Health education strategies are tailored for their target population. Health education presents information to target populations on particular health topics, including the health benefits/threats they face, and provides tools to build capacity and support behavior change in an appropriate setting.

Examples of health education activities include:

Lectures Courses Seminars Webinars Workshops Classes

Characteristics of health education strategies include:

1. Participation of the target population. 2. Completion of a community needs assessment to identify community capacity, resources, priorities, and needs. 3. Planned learning activities that increase participants' knowledge and skills. 4. Implementation of programs with integrated, well-planned curricula and materials that take place in a setting convenient for participants. 5. Presentation of information with audiovisual and computer based supports such as slides and projectors, videos, books, CDs, posters, pictures, websites, or software programs. 6. Ensuring proficiency of program staff, through training, to maintain fidelity to the program model.

When wrestling with the attitude-behaviour gap and grappling with the emotional and often-irrational nature of the human animal (aka any of your business's stakeholders), you’ll need all the help you can get. Whether you’re crafting a communications strategy to encourage positive behaviour change or facilitating a process to unleash new ideas and breakthrough innovation on a project, thankfully, digital media is facilitating the rapid sharing and diffusion of smart, practical ways to create change.

Over time, I’ve come across a range of online tools, usually free, that provide useful frameworks or helpful stimulus for shaping change and driving innovation. Here I’ll share some of the tools I’ve found most useful, and I invite you to use the comment functionality below to share your favorites with other readers.Communication tools that also influence behaviour

I’ve found insights from the worlds of behavioural psychology and user experience (UX) design particularly useful. Here are some of the best:

Design with Intent Toolkit

Find 101 approaches to influencing behaviour through design, organised into eight lenses such as the ‘interaction lens’ or the ‘ludic lens.’ Even better, they’re completely free to download.

Wheel of Persuasion

This tool offers a wide range of scientific insights into the psychology of conversion grouped into five dimensions. While it’s focused on online UX design, the thinking can equally be applied to encouraging more sustainable behaviour; for example, the principle of ‘equivalence framing’ is presented in terms of persuading online purchases but can equally be applied to persuading people to make more sustainable purchases. 46 insights are openly available on the website, but you need an access code to view the full tool.

The Hooked Model

A four-stage approach to creating products and services that form habits. More detail of the thinking behind this trigger-action-reward-investment approach can be found in this Slideshare deck or by reading the book.

Mental Notes Cards

50 cards, each featuring an insight into human behaviour and how to translate this into better web design. The principles can easily be adapted to tackling the challenges of promoting sustainable consumption – for example an approach such as ‘chunking’ (grouping information into familiar manageable units) works as well for explaining a complex sustainability concept as for helping someone navigate a website. Out of print currently, but worth getting when available again – in the meantime, check out the bookshelf that inspired them.

Traditional healing practice is an important and integral part of healthcare systems in almost all countries of the world. Very few studies have addressed the holistic scenario of traditional healing practices in Bangladesh, although these serve around 80% of the ailing people. This study explored distinctive forms of traditional healing practices in rural Bangladesh.Methods

During July to October 2007, the study team conducted 64 unstructured interviews, and 18 key informant interviews with traditional healers and patients from Bhabanipur and Jobra, two adjacent villages in Chittagong district, Bangladesh. The study also used participatory observations of traditional healing activities in the treatment centers.Results

Majority of the community members, especially people of low socioeconomic status, first approached the traditional healers with their medical problems. Only after failure of such treatment did they move to qualified physicians for modern treatment. Interestingly, if this failed, they returned to the traditional healers. This study identified both religious and non-religious healing practices. The key religious healing practices reportedly included Kalami, Bhandai, and Spiritual Healing, whereas the non-religious healing practices included Sorcery, Kabiraji, and Home Medicine. Both patients and healers practiced self-medication at home with their indigenous knowledge. Kabiraji was widely practiced based on informal use of local medicinal plants in rural areas. Healers in both Kalami and Bhandari practices resorted to religious rituals, and usually used verses of holy books in healing, which required a firm belief of patients for the treatment to be effective. Sorcerers deliberately used their so-called supernatural power not only to treat a patient but also to cause harm to others upon secret request. The spiritual healing reportedly diagnosed and cured the health problems through communication with sacred spirits. Although the fee for diagnosis was small, spiritual healing required different types of treatment instruments, which made the treatment implicitly expensive.Conclusions

Traditional healing was widely practiced as the means of primary healthcare in rural areas of Bangladesh, especially among the people with low socioeconomic status. The extent of services showed no decline with the advancement of modern medical sciences; rather it has increased with the passage of time.